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Will Trump Make You Care About Climate Change?

By pulling out of Paris, the president is going to turbocharge the politics of global warning. But will it matter?

By BILL SCHER

Donald Trump won the presidency after promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But once he tried to follow through on his pledge, the public focused on what had been gained, and the health reform law became more popular than ever.

Climate change is not like health care. Everyone goes to the doctor or knows somebody with cancer, but most people don’t live near melting glaciers or along threatened coastlines. Global warming’s most dramatic effects—from more frequent major storms to desertification to failing crops—will be felt years in the future. But now that Trump is about to follow through on his pledge to abandon the Paris climate pact, Democrats are hoping he will spark a renewed commitment to protecting the planet, and unwittingly turn the environment into a powerful wedge issue—just as he did with health care.

California Governor Jerry Brown predicted such a green backlash in a Wednesday BBC interview. The withdrawal from Paris, Brown said, “will be damaging, but not as damaging as you might think. Because President Trump, in a paradoxical way, is giving climate denial a very bad name. And in fact, he’s fostering more activism and more effort and more collaboration on the opposite side.”

If that prediction bears out, climate change would attain a status it never had before in America: It would become a voting issue.

Sure, you may (like most Americans) accept the scientific consensus that global warming is real and fueled by humans. You may even be worried that global warming is going to wreck the planet. But that’s no guarantee you’re going to vote for a candidate who is going to do anything about it, or demand that those in power put climate action at the top of America’s to-do list.

According to a March 2016 survey from Yale and George Mason universities, roughly a third of both Trump supporters in the presidential primary and Republican voters overall believe global warming is “caused mostly by human activity” and express worry about it. Yet they did not break from their party. They proceeded to help elect a man who once called global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese and said during the campaign, “I am not a believer, and we have much bigger problems.”

It’s not only Republican voters who have downgraded the issue. While Republicans and Democrats are far apart in their climate outlook, a 2016 Gallup assessment of issue priorities found that Democratic passion tends to be channeled toward issues such as economic inequality and health care. The Yale-George Mason study offers a clue why: While 78 percent of Democratic voters are “worried” about global warming, only 26 percent are “very worried.”

In a world in which many crises compete for our attention, climate change often loses out. That helps explain why climate has often been sidelined even when Democrats hold political power. In early 2009, when Barack Obama was president and Democrats held 58 Senate seats, nearly half of their caucus joined Republicans to prevent legislation capping carbon emissions from inclusion in the budget reconciliation process, which would have exempted it from filibusters.

At the time, 17 Democratic senators represented top coal-producing states and others were from states known for oil and automobile production. But even liberal stalwart Russ Feingold of Wisconsin voted to deny climate a legislative fast track, months after Obama said his presidency would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.” Without a broad sense of grass-roots urgency, senators were more sensitive to parochial interests and put their feet on the brakes. As the vote foreshadowed, climate legislation that eventually eked out of the House hit a brick wall in the Senate. Obama’s second-term climate achievements—the Paris pact and the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Act—necessitated a bypass of Congress, which left them vulnerable to Trump’s pen and the courts.

Senate Democrats were even less helpful during the Bill Clinton presidency. Before Vice President Al Gore went to Kyoto, Japan, to hammer out an international treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution rejecting the premise of the talks. A spooked White House never submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Environmental activists have long been frustrated at their inability to galvanize the public around climate change. Earth Day festivals, climate marches, pipeline encampments and even an Academy Award-winning documentary by that former presidential popular vote winner haven’t done the trick.

Why not? A 2012 study from two University of Oregon professors, one a psychologist, pinned down the six reasons why the human brain just isn’t well-equipped to view climate change “as an important moral imperative.”

For example, climate change “possesses few features that generate rapid, emotional visceral reactions: It is an abstract, temporally and spatially distant phenomenon consisting of many different, disparate and seemingly incongruous events.” The harshest consequences “affect individuals who live in faraway places, or who will live far in the future.” And since no one knows exactly what the future holds, the “uncertainty breeds wishful thinking.” Our political dilemma rests on the fact that carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for decades, so action is required now to avert catastrophe in the future. But without acute signs of catastrophe, political urgency is difficult to muster.

Environmental issues used to offer opportunity for forward-thinking bipartisanship—Richard Nixon acquiesced to the establishment of the EPA and George H.W. Bush signed the 1990 Clean Air Act, which successfully tackled acid rain and provided a legal foundation for Obama’s executive action on climate. George W. Bush at least felt obligated to acknowledge global warming was happening, and 2008 Republican nominee John McCain co-sponsored legislation to cap carbon.

The Oregon study explains why, despite that history, climate has not lent itself to easy bipartisanship cooperation: “Moral Tribalism.” “[L]iberals tend to base their moral priorities on two foundations of individual welfare — harm and fairness — whereas conservatives supplement these with [a focus] on protecting the in-group.” Arguments for climate action generally are rooted solely in those liberal values, but that has produced a conservative base that isn’t just skeptical of taking action to stop climate change, “but morally hostile to it.”

Trump’s Paris pullout is likely to turn that partisan divide into a chasm. Will it lead to change, though? You can expect every Democratic presidential candidate to win easy applause from primary voters by pledging a return to Paris, but that hardly guarantees that the general electorate can be galvanized to demand action.

For Paris to resemble the ACA, sparking not only favorable poll numbers but also visible grass-roots energy that goes beyond the usual activist suspects, the public is going to have to viscerally feel the effect of Trump’s turnabout. And that is going to depend on whether the international community responds in kind.

By itself, the abandonment of Paris won’t immediately affect the day-to-day lives of Americans. The prospect of condemning the globe to a 4-to-6 degree Celsius temperature increase by year 2100 is the definition of “abstract.”

Less abstract is whether or not coal jobs return as a result. Trump argued in the campaign that pulling out of Paris would be part of a plan to “save the coal industry.” Yet several coal executives warned Trump that walking away from the international table risked denying the coal industry a seat. Coal is already dying in part because natural gas and renewable energies are increasingly affordable. As global markets increasingly turn toward cleaner sources, what coal needs to survive is government help to fund costly “carbon capture” technology. Ditching Paris along with Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” likely leaves coal twisting in the wind turbines.

Trump’s base has proven highly tolerant of Trump’s “all talk, no action” record. So a lack of a coal renaissance probably wouldn’t be enough to scramble the climate fault lines. After all, barely anybody—only 50,000 people in a nation of 320 million—actually works in the coal business anymore. Coal is more of a nostalgic symbol of past American industrial greatness than a line of work people are desperate to get back into. However, if a lack of a coal-powered economic boom is combined with retaliatory action by other countries, a broad swath of Americans may feel pinched in the pocketbook.

The Paris agreement lacks an enforcement mechanism, so nothing is automatic. And it’s possible many countries will effectively follow Trump’s lead—failing to follow through on their pledges to cut emissions and rendering the agreement useless.

But there are signs of defiance. China and the European Union are planning a joint statement that recommits them to Paris and declares, “climate action and the clean energy transition an imperative more important than ever.” Some foreign leaders are letting their anger at Trump show. The European Commission president snapped, “The Americans can’t just leave the climate protection agreement … We tried to explain that to Mr. Trump … in clear German sentences. It seems that our attempt failed, but the law is the law, and it must be obeyed.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the climate discussion with Trump as “very difficult, if not to say very dissatisfying.”

The pointed verbal responses raise the possibility of a severe policy response: carbon tariffs. If America doesn’t voluntarily do its part to meet its Paris pledges, other countries can make the United States contribute by slapping carbon tariffs on exported goods that account for the cost to the planet of any greenhouse gases emitted.

In the wake of Trump’s victory in November, government officials in Canada and Mexico began discussing the possibility of carbon tariffs, as did one of the runner-up French presidential candidates. A trade war is not something other nations would barrel into lightly—the president of the International Emissions Trading Association told CNBC that “a trade battle over climate change is something everyone's tried to avoid for two or three decades.” But the more Trump threatens the international order and the fate of all humanity, and the more Trump becomes a politically useful foil, the less reason foreign leaders have to hesitate.

If the international community strikes back, Trump will have created a nightmare scenario for nationalists. The champion of coal, derider of climate science and warrior against globalism will have forced Americans to pay a carbon tax imposed from abroad. Unlike a domestically designed carbon tax, Americans won’t get anything back from it: no rebates for American consumers, no investments to create American clean energy jobs, no subsidies for American clean coal projects. Just fewer exports and lost jobs.

“Moral tribalism” could still carry the day in this extreme scenario. The congenitally combative Trump would likely throw himself into the trade war and many loyalists would cheer him on. But presumably everyone has a breaking point. Trump may not want to find out how steep the average family’s grocery bill and gas tank fill-up has to get before his voters conclude Mr. Art of the Deal walked away from a good deal and left them with a raw deal.

At that point, the climate issue would no longer be an abstraction. The dangers would no longer feel remote. Voters would more easily grasp that while protecting the planet has a cost, trying to skip out on the bill costs even more.

Democrats and climate activists can’t count on the world to come to their rescue. The political and psychological factors that have kept climate as a second-tier political issue may persist. But the legacy of the Paris pact may be that the international community has concluded that failure is not an option, and it will make climate a top-tier issue whether Trump likes it or not.